Over the last few weeks I have been sharing my strategy to drop some fat and get my abs back. Today I weighed and measured myself and I'm pleased, but not surprised to say it worked.

Now before we get into the numbers I just want to admit that I didn't stick to it 100%. We had a couple of meals out, another weekend away and a bit of a shoulder niggle that made me reduce the amount of training I did. Regardless of all this, the results were pretty impressive.

In the last 4 weeks I dropped 6lbs, lost 3/4" of my waist and 1.5" round my hips (and most importantly the bullying has stopped!), which is not bad going considering i didn't have much to lose in the first place.If you combine everything I have told you over the last month with the Optimum Nutrition Diet you could achieve some pretty amazing results.

All great steps to take if you want to lose fat, but if you want to to see the fat melt away, you need to take it one step further. Remember my description of unnecessary foods:

I regard 'unnecessary food' to be any food that either has no nutritional value or whose nutritional value can be got somewhere else for less calories

Processed Vegetable Oils: I could have included this last week because it is another no-brainer. Unless your vegetable oil has been 'cold pressed', it goes through a very long and quite scary process before it hits the supermarket shelf.

The seeds are cleaned to separate if from the soil, leaves etc

They are then crushed, rolled and pressed to extract the oil. So far so good.

After rolling the seeds still contain some valuable oil, so first is is cleaned with a solvent

The oil is then washed with sodium hydroxide

De-waxed

Bleached to lighten the colour

De-odorised

And finally bottled up.

Tasty! I'll stick to my cold pressed coconut oil thanks.

Beans & Legumes: Now I don't think legumes are bad, they're not, but I do think they are unnecessary. They contain protein which is a good thing, but the amount is pitiful when compared to meat and you're also going to get an extra 20g of carbohydrate per portion.

Dairy: Again, not particularly bad, but I generally feel better the less dairy I eat. I used to always have spots on my back which I put down to sweating a lot through work, however when I cut out dairy they cleared up, then returned again when I re-introduced it. Last summer was my first dairy free and it was also the only year I didn't suffer from hay-fever, so if you are a hay fever sufferer it may be worth a try. That year I also lost 6lbs in 4 weeks without making any other changes to my diet.Anyway enough about me. When asked most people say you need dairy for calcium, but gram for gram kale has more calcium than milk with less calories, so it makes the unnecessary list.

So there you have it, my fool proof plan to stop myself getting bullied by a twelve year old girl!

I will report back in a couple of weeks to let you know how it all went.

OK, so maybe that is a bit extreme, but my training is now back in full flow and I feel great for it. I don't know why I let my training slip because i love it, it makes me feel good and there is never any excuse for not doing it.

It doesn't matter where you are, you always have your own body weight. When I have no equipment I tend to go for press ups, hill climbers and bridges because i think these three exercises give the most bang for your buck. If you have access to some sort of bar, like monkey bars or a sturdy tree branch then you're laughing. If i could only use one piece of equipment it would be a pull up bar. The possibilities are endless and there is no muscle above your hips that you can't work, regardless of how strong you are.

To follow on from last weeks post about having a set training plan, the next step is to have a set diet plan. However if you didn't stick to your plan, go back and try again. I know I have said in the past that Diet is more important than exercise, and it is, but it is a lot easier to stick to a training plan than a diet plan. It's easy to take 3 hours a week out to exercise, but diet is a constant battle. It will take you a lot less time to get into a routine with your training and this will have a positive knock on effect with your diet.

If you work a 9 to 5 job then your plan will be the same for each day, but my working week is all over the place. Some days I work a 6 hour block in the morning, others it's the evening, Wednesdays are just ridiculous. I'm working til 12, have an hour break then back to it for a couple of hours, then I get few hours off before it's back to work till 9. So I need to look at each day individually to see what works best day by day.

This is exactly what I have done for next week, so now I know when to eat, I know need to work out what to eat. Normally I have an idea of what meals I will be eating a day or so in advance, but to make sure I have no excuses I am going to plan exactly what I will eat at each meal time. Again it would be pointless for me to plan to have a homemade curry when I only have 1 hour to eat, so I need to be realistic and save the time consuming meals for when I have enough time to prepare them. I often make 2 or 3 meals at once and freeze some, to save time on other days. Like with the training all this helps me draw a clear line between success and failure, which is important.

Because I am wanting to jump start my fat loss I am going to be more strict with the foods I choose than I normally would be. I am going to cut out all foods that I call 'unnecessary'. I regard 'unnecessary food' to be any food that either has no nutritional value or whose nutritional value can be got somewhere else for less calories.

So the first one is easy:

Sugar: You've probably heard sugar being described as 'empty calories' before, and that is exactly what it is, sugar has nothing nutritional in it. Your body will use it for energy, but it can also use fruit, veg and fat.Alcohol: There are some health benefits to moderate alcohol consumption, especially red wine, but when we are when we are trying to lose weight, it comes high up on the unnecessary list. For more information have a read of this.Grains: Low in nutrition, high in calories when compared to veg, so again a no-brainer. A lot of people including myself don't react well with gluten, so cutting out the grains will reduce bloating and more than likely increase your energy levels.

These are the first foods that I would eliminate from the diet. Next week I will cover a few more foods you may want to think about eliminating.

It tastes great, you can make low sugar chocolates with it, and a spoonful in your coffee before training is the best pre-workout supplement I have ever taken, you feel like batman ready to take on the world of evil.

All this is enough to make me recommend it, but there are also a whole load of health benefits that come with it:

Coconut oil is high in fat, especially medium chain triglycerides, which are sent straight to the liver to be metabolized, providing a quick source of energy. This probably explains the super hero effect before training.

50% of the fat is Lauric acid, which is an anti bacterial helping you to fight off infections and viruses.

The same Lauric acid has a positive effect on your cholesterol, by increasing your HDL's (the so called good cholesterol) and decrease the ratio on total to HDL cholesterol, reducing your risk of heart disease.

It can make you eat less. That spoonful in a coffee is surprisingly filling and it can put off hunger for a good couple of hours. So next time you're feeling a bit peckish, but not ready for a meal give it a go.

This may come as a surprise, but I'm not really 'up' on the whole beauty product scene. I occasionally use soap, but that's about it. I have heard coconut oil is quite popular at some beauticians because of it's moisturising effect and I have had some experience of it.Last year I started getting dandruff, which I found quite unusual because I hardly have any hair. Anyway, i experimented rubbing the oil on my head, giving it a rather appealing gleam, every other day for two weeks and i found the dandruff had stopped and it hasn't returned since.My youngest daughter used to get dry skin on her hands and feet. Again we used the coconut oil and within a few weeks had cleared up and hasn't returned.You can use coconut oil as a fat just as you would butter, because it has a high smoke point making it good for cooking unlike olive oil. We use it in baking, chocolate, stir fry's, but it doesn't work with everything. I used it to fry an omelette once making the whole thing taste like coconut. So i would stick with butter for eggs, but veg works really well.

When you buy your coconut oil just make sure you go for organic, cold pressed (we get ours from www.chia4uk.com). The refined coconut oil has been heated, bleached, deodorized and possibly had chemical solvents added. This process removes all the health benefits from the oil and may also created hydrogenated or trans fats, which are going to increase your risk of heart disease rather than decreasing it.